the slippery slope of intent

A portion that I removed from my definition paper because it did not really fit. My first attempt to struggle with the justification of Intent...

Yet here we will attempt to address another necessary issue in defining violence and non-violence: intent. Is it violent to assign work that cuts into a person’s leisure time violent? No. However, could it be argued that by adding stress to anothers' life, and limiting their means to unwind potentially physically or mentally damaging? Yes, and as such could these actions be defined as violent? Perhaps, and this is where we encounter the issue of intent. By assigning work was it my intention to overburden you, and as a result compromise your physical and mental state? Most likely not, in all likelihood work needed to be done, or there were more concepts that must be learned or implemented by one’s self. This of course puts us on an equally slippery slope. Assigning this work, and the intentions of doing so, are justifiable because the work is intended to benefit the greater good of society, or the individual doing the work. Under this same logic could any intent be legitimate if it is done for the greater good? This certainly seems to be the case with the incarceration of persons deemed harmful to society. Individuals are stripped of their personal liberties and detained for the good of society, and so they might be “reformed.” This could be perceived as violence as it could be mentally, physically and emotionally damaging to an individual, yet I believe that few would argue for the abolition of the prison system. What I am getting at is that if one attempts to define violence and nonviolence down to the minutia one quickly becomes bogged down with the issue of intent. As such, allow me to provide a more general definition that will attempt to classify the majority of, might we say, “significant” actions, and leave other actions to be judged on a case-by-case basis.